Double-Timing the King

Published: February 2, 2003

Perhaps the final verdict on Wallis Warfield Spencer Simpson, better known as the Duchess of Windsor, should be William Manchester's. In the second volume of his biography of Winston Churchill, he writes, simply and pungently, ''If the man existed with whom Wallis had enjoyed a platonic friendship, his name is lost to history.'' Mr. Manchester also quotes H. L. Mencken on the subject of Mrs. Simpson's affair with Edward VIII, which led to his abdication in 1936 and his becoming the Duke of Windsor. Mencken was a Baltimore man, and Mrs. Simpson was ''the Baltimore woman.'' He called it ''the greatest story since the resurrection.''

And, really, it has only gotten better with time. It may lack some of the luridness and frankness of the sexual peccadilloes that have afflicted the British royal family in recent years. But because it involved a constitutional crisis and the downfall of a king, it will always be the larger story. In a sense, time has only vindicated the intransigence of Stanley Baldwin, the prime minister who refused to allow Edward VIII to marry Mrs. Simpson and keep his throne. Newly opened files in the Public Records Office reveal that detectives from the police's Special Branch were watching Mrs. Simpson closely.

What they saw was worth watching. Even as her divorce from her second husband was becoming final and she was having an affair with the king, she was also having an affair with a man almost cinematically named Guy Marcus Trundle, a sometime engineer and Ford salesman from York. The detectives described him as ''a very charming adventurer, very good-looking, well bred and an excellent dancer.''

The pity in this piteous affair is the earnestness, and the naïveté, of Edward VIII, whose abdication speech, partly written by Churchill, is a testament to the virtue of wedded love. Even Churchill, who defended Edward, saw that Mrs. Simpson had removed a potentially bad king from the throne, something that the couple's flirtation with Hitler made apparent. At the heart of the story is an odd reversal. One can almost imagine Mrs. Simpson in the court of Charles II, the Lady Castlemaine, if not the Nell Gwyn of her day. But it's impossible to imagine Edward VIII in the role of Charles II. A few years ago, the auction of personal effects of the diminutive duke and duchess revealed that the former king was a man, above all, who knew how to take care of his clothes.